Android’s market share in Spain rises to astounding 84%

In the US, Android’s market share has stabilized somewhere around 50% of the smartphone market, mainly because the iPhone’s market share has grown when the iPhone became available on Sprint. It’s also because other companies such has RIM still have a pretty significant market share in US despite the corporation’s seemingly imminent buyout vs. demise endgame scenario.

The iPhone appeared for the first time in US, it’s from a US company, it had the most marketing in US, and lastly, we’re talking about Apple here. It’s a company that is loved by a much bigger share of the country’s citizens, compared to other countries where Apple has a much smaller presence. So I’m not surprised to see that Android’s market share in US tends to be smaller than in other countries when compared to its global market share.

In comparison, you can’t help by be surprised when Android reaches such heights in market share in countries like China, where they have 70% market share for last quarter’s sales. But the highest and most impressive Android market share in a country seems to exist in Spain, where more than 4 out of 5 smartphone buyers are choosing Android, or 84% of them to be exact. That’s almost hard to believe, because it’s getting very close to market share numbers that only Microsoft’s Windows has had.

So why is this high growth happening? Dominic Sunnebo, consumer insight director and Kantar World Panel ComTech, said:

“We are seeing much of Android sales growth being driven by consumers trading up from feature phones to smartphones. Android handsets currently offer an easier platform to enable these consumers to upgrade, as many first time smartphone consumers state ‘price of handset’ and ‘multimedia capabilities’ as their main reason for choosing an Android device.”

Android is simply the default choice for many people, regardless of whether they want to buy a high-end unlocked phone, or a lower end one for around 50 euro on a 2 year contract, which seems to be the bulk of most of these sales, because most people don’t care about buying the most high-end smartphone in the market.

This growth also seems to be coming from people who were on feature phones before (like on Nokia’s Symbian devices) and now want to switch to a more powerful Android smartphone. This is something the carriers also love, because smartphone buyers, even those who buy lower-end smartphones, tend to spend more on their bills, because they want higher subsidies for a better device, and because they want a data plan to go with it as well.